Visualizing of oxygen transport with Blender3D

As part of a digital learning platform developed for Swedish primary and secondary school, animations and visualizations of the human body have been developed. The focus of the learning platform is the human body as a “system of systems”. In order to convey the oxygen transport function of blood, multi-scale visualizations were built with the open source 3D-software Blender 3D. By using a simple set of 3D primitives and different modifiers we were able to relatively rapidly construct animations and images of lung alveoli and blood vessels with erythrocytes flowing. Models of alveoli and alveolar capillary networks were built from scratch, as well as blood vessels and blood cells (erythrocytes, leukocytes and thrombocytes). Rigid body simulation was used to create an animation of moving blood cells. Molecular scale events were depicted by using PDB-models of plasma membrane and human hemoglobin and rendered in UCSF Chimera. The rendered images were composited and edited in Adobe Photoshop into a section of an erythrocyte. A python script made for Chimera simulates diffusion of carbon dioxide and oxygen molecules over the membrane.